Friday, February 12, 2016

Lead Pipe Cinch

Everyone assumes that the water flowing from their taps is scrupulously examined by several layers of state and federal agencies, particularly the Environmental Protection Agency. We all know about the outrageous levels of lead content in the Flint, Michigan water supply, but most of us strongly believe, “it can’t happen here.” Right.

Ok, most drinking water supplies – and remember we have about over 53,000 water districts here in the U.S. – are safe, but… “TheEnvironmental Protection Agencysays streams tapped by water utilities serving a third of the population are not yet covered by clean-water laws that limit levels of toxic pollutants. Even purified water often travels to homes through pipes that are in stunning disrepair, potentially open to disease and pollutants.

“Although Congress banned lead water pipes 30 years ago, between 3.3 million and 10 million older ones remain, primed to leach lead into tap water by forces as simple as jostling during repairs or a change in water chemistry.

‘We have a lot of threats to the water supply,’ said Dr. Jeffrey K. Griffiths, a professor of public health at Tufts University and a former chairman of the E.P.A.’s Drinking Water Committee. ‘And we have lots of really good professionals in the water industry who see themselves as protecting the public good. But it doesn’t take much for our aging infrastructure or an unprofessional actor to allow that protection to fall apart.’” New York Times, February 8th.

And it’s not as if we haven’t seen Flint-like conditions before: “InSebring, Ohio, routine laboratory tests last August found unsafe levels of lead in the town’s drinking water after workers stopped adding a chemical to keep lead water pipes from corroding. Five months passed before the city told pregnant women and children not to drink the water, and shut down taps and fountains in schools.

“In 2001, after Washington, D.C., changed how it disinfected drinking water, lead in tap water at thousands of homes spiked as much as 20 times the federally approved level. Residents did not find out for three years. When they did, officials ripped out lead water pipes feeding 17,600 homes — and discovered three years later that many of therepairs had only prolonged the contamination.” NY Times. Fixing pipe can shake out lead during the process, and as lead pipes get older, those which passed muster a few years ago can suddenly loose lead into the taps of local residents.

“In 2011, the water authority in Brick Township, N.J., an oceanside settlement of 75,000 people, tested tap water in a small sample of homes for lead, as the E.P.A. requires be done periodically. It discovered two homes in which the level exceeded the agency’s limit of 15 parts per billion, well short of the number that required remedial steps.

“But in the next mandated test, three years later, it found that 16 of 34 homes exceeded the limit — one of them by a dozen times. The growing use of road salt in recent winters, it turned out,had raised chloride levelsin the river from which Brick drew its water. Undetected, the chloride corroded aged lead pipes running to older homes, leaching lead into tap water…

“Unsafe levels of lead have turned upin tap water in city after city—in Durham and Greenville, N.C.,in 2006; in Columbia, S.C., in 2005; andlast July in Jackson, Miss.,where officials waited six months to disclose the contamination — as well as in scores of other places in recent years.” NY Times. How about your community? Feel good that Congress wants to pull back on EPA authority, cut funding to what conservatives see as an EPA “job killer” posture to waste money to insure pure drinking water? Really? Drinking “life killing” toxins is okay as long as the big local industries can grow their profits without paying for the damage. Trust your elected officials to do the right thing when it will cost their biggest contributors a pretty penny?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the popularity of bottled water has occurred simply because we no longer trust our most basic governmental infrastructure to do what our political leaders promised it would do!

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Peter's Bio

Peter J. Dekom practices law in Los Angeles and was formerly "of counsel" with Weissmann Wolff Bergman Coleman Grodin & Evall and a partner in the firm of Bloom, Dekom, Hergott and Cook. Mr. Dekom's clients include or have included such Hollywood notables as George Lucas, Paul Haggis, Keenen Ivory Wayans, John Travolta, Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, Andy Davis, Robert Towne and Larry Gordon among many others, as well as corporate clients such as Sears, Roebuck and Co., Pacific Telesis and Japan Victor Corporation (JVC). He has been listed in Forbes among the top 100 lawyers in the United States and in Premiere Magazine as one of the 50 most powerful people in Hollywood .

Mr. Dekom has been a management/marketing consultant, and entrepreneur in the fields of entertainment, Internet, and telecommunications. As a consultant to the state of New Mexico for almost a decade, he was instrumental in creating, writing and implementing legislation to encourage film and television production in the state and supervised the film loan program portion of that incentive structure until the spring of 2011. Mr. Dekom has also provided off-balance sheet, insurance-backed financing for major motion picture studios.

Mr. Dekom served on the board of directors of Imagine Films Entertainment while the company remained publicly traded and was a board member of Will Vinton Studios and Cinebase Software, among others, leaving upon change of ownership. He has also served as a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences and Academy Foundation, Board of Directors, Chairman (now Emeritus) of the American Cinematheque, and on the Advisory Board of the Shanghai International Film Festival. He recently served on the Board of Governors for the America Bar Assn.’s Sports and Entertainment Law Section, where he often authored articles, delivered lectures and continues to be an active participant.

The Beverly Hills Bar Association honored Mr. Dekom as Entertainment Lawyer of the Year in 1994, the Century City Bar Association accorded him the same honor in 2004, and the Family Assistance Program named him Man of the Year in 1992 for his work with the homeless. In 2012, the American Bar Association, through its Forum on Sports and Entertainment Law, honored Mr. Dekom with its highest recognition for entertainment lawyers, the Ed Rubin Service Award. Author of dozens of scholarly articles, Mr. Dekom also is the co-author of Not on My Watch; Hollywood vs. the Future (New Millennium Publishing, 2003) with Peter Sealey and author of Next: Reinventing Media, Marketing and Entertainment (HekaRose Publishing Group 2014). He has served as an adjunct professor in the UCLA Film School, a lecturer (entertainment marketing) at the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business as well as being a featured speaker at film festivals, corporations, universities and bar associations all over the world.

Mr. Dekom graduated from Yale in 1968 (BA), and graduated first in his class in 1973 from the UCLA School of Law (JD). He is married to Kelley Choate, an MBA and former art gallery-owner who evolved into a renowned micro-collage artist in her own right. He also has a son, Christopher (b. 1983), who is a Duke University graduate, a Chartered Financial Analyst, a 2013 Darden (UVa) MBA graduate, and is currently an executive with a Los Angeles-based media and entertainment company. Chris' wife, Stephanie (a 2013 George Washington University MD grad), is a neonatal pediatrics 'fellow' at a major Los Angeles hospital